Montana's only forensic laboratory replaced paper-intensive quality processes with automated digital tasks, eliminating hours to days of recurring manual work while maintaining international accreditation.
Introduction
The Montana Forensic Science Division serves as the state's sole forensic laboratory, providing critical analysis services to law enforcement agencies across Montana. Operating two facilities—the main laboratory in Missoula and a satellite location in Billings—the division handles everything from toxicological, chemical, and biological analysis to firearms and latent print examinations along with Intoxilyzer calibrations. With approximately 45 staff members working across multiple disciplines, maintaining consistent quality standards and regulatory compliance is essential to supporting criminal investigations statewide.
The division operates under rigorous ISO/IEC 17025 international standards, requiring meticulous document control, staff training verification and quality assurance activities across all testing and calibration disciplines.
The challenge
Before implementing Ideagen's quality management solution, Montana's forensic laboratory struggled with fragmented, manual processes:
- Cumbersome document control: Procedures required track changes in Microsoft Word documents, manual PDF creation, supervisor signatures and moving files between network folders—a process consuming weeks or even months per revision cycle.
- Time-intensive acknowledgments: Staff procedure acknowledgment required creating Word documents, printing and distributing to mailboxes, waiting up to a month for completion, then collecting and scanning—consuming hours to days of QA manager time per acknowledgment cycle.
- Multi-site coordination challenges: Opening the Billings satellite laboratory created the need to maintain quality standards across locations, requiring a shift to digital quality management tasks.
- Scattered quality records: Corrective actions, reports and quality assurance data existed as disparate Word or PDF forms and paper files, making audit preparation and information retrieval difficult.
Before we would print a piece of paper and it would go to each person. Then the QA manager would have to collect all those pieces of paper and scan them in. Now the acknowledgment ensures that staff is aware there's a new policy, and it does it for you.
The solution
When the division's Quality Assurance Manager resigned in 2019, the subsequent accreditation assessment revealed the need for a centralized quality management system.
The division selected Ideagen's quality management solution for its ability to:
- Provide robust document control with automated version management and archival processes that align with ISO/IEC 17025 requirements
- Streamline workflow creation for quality activities, such as documenting impartiality, nonconforming work, vendor approvals, equipment calibration, and testimony evaluation
- Web-based access allows for multi-site operations and on demand access across multiple devices
- Flexible testing and training modules for staff completion and record retention
Implementation and impact
Montana implemented the solution in spring 2020, with two staff members attending comprehensive training. The division set its goal: upload all policies and procedures by year-end to drive user adoption. They met this target, then systematically built out automated acknowledgment tests and integrating quality assurance tasks through workflows.
Workflows definitely has made those paper processes more efficient and helped with documentation for the accreditation audits and internal audits.
The transformation proved most dramatic in document management. Supervisors gained autonomy to edit and approve their own section procedures without quality assurance involvement, eliminating bottlenecks. Document revision cycles that previously consumed days, weeks, or months now are completed in minutes to days. Automated acknowledgment tests deploy immediately when procedures are revised, replacing the time-intensive process of creating documents or emails, waiting for returns and compiling.
The division created automated safety training tests that deploy three times per year without manual intervention, in addition to various workflows for evaluating testimony, proficiency testing, customer feedback, and more. Quality assurance assignments that once existed on paper forms now flow through digital workflows, providing instant access during audits and management reviews.
Once you set training up, it's done for you and you can forget it...On the quality management side, everything's in one place now so it has made my life a lot easier.
The results
90%+ time reduction in document revisions: Policy updates that previously took days, weeks, or months now complete in minutes to days as supervisors independently manage procedures, eliminating QA manager bottlenecks
Hours to days saved per acknowledgment cycle: Automated testing with just 1-2 hours of initial setup replaced manual document creation, mailbox or email distribution to 46 staff members, month-long collection periods and compilation of paper documents or emails
Instant audit access: Digital workflows enable immediate information retrieval for accreditation assessments, replacing time-consuming manual searches
Enhanced QA efficiency: Automation simplified reporting and information gathering for meetings, management reviews and audits
Explore quality management solutions
Automate and streamline your quality processes, identify opportunities for excellence and achieve compliance with regulations and standards.
